The Liar's Dictionary

Hourglass imagery is not always coincident with a sense of hopelessness, however. In fact, thinking about it, sometimes it exists as a symbol for a certain necessity to seize the hour: perhaps for this reason hourglasses feature on many heraldic crests. I’ve looked it up. Of course I have. In one of its more savoury definitions, the online UrbanDictionary.com lists the verb hourglassing in reference to ‘a state in which a computer is “thinking” and is currently unresponsive. Not exactly frozen, hourglassing gives a potentially false sense of action on the part of the computer.’ Many families unite in baying, unfestive horror during games of Charades or Pictionary as the final grains of sand fall through the necks of supplied hourglasses. Hourglasses of this size are also called egg-timers. Although this is probably a practical description of its use amongst, say, the soft-boiling breakfast community, I do think that egg-timer lacks the poetry of the other possible synonym clepsammia. The lexicographer Noah Webster listed this word in his 1828 dictionary – its etymological roots are the Greek words for sand and theft, the idea being that as each grain slips through the hourglass’s waist another moment is being taken away. Clepsammia certainly has a pleasing clicking sibilance to it, and as a word evokes a slick trickling of the contents from bulb to bulb as well as the flipping-over of its body. Unlike Webster’s, Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary overlooked the word clepsammia in its published incomplete 1930 edition. It does, however, provide the word hourglass as a hyphenated noun. With its symmetry and little dashed isthmus between the two words, ‘hourglass’ on the page is like the object itself, lying on its side or balanced mid-spin.

The phone kept ringing, boring into my skull.

Of course, the hourglass is not the only symbol that accompanies hapless computer users (me) and their periods of waiting. There’s Apple products’ spinning orb known affectionately as the ‘Spinning Beach Ball of Death’ or the ‘Marble of Doom’. My old BlackBerry occasionally presented me with a graphic of a squared-off clock, its hands rotating uncontrollably. BlackBerry-time, Apple-time, egg-time. My laptop at home was far newer than my office computer and ran on a far more up-to-date operating system. Bereft of hourglasses, my waiting was instead accompanied by its replacement, its inheritor: a glowing ring, a tiny green ouroboros graphic forever eating its own tail. The same irritation existed, the feeling of being trapped in a state of suspension rather than progress being made, but stripped of the more esoteric timekeeping device. This glowing circle felt somehow more clinical and inhumane, its cultural implications less to do with pirates and Father Time and more HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey or the KITT vehicle’s front-scanning bar in Knight Rider. Armed with the iconography of vanitas, maybe other operating systems in the future will adopt symbols of futility such as skulls or rotting flowers. Perhaps a small pixelated Sisyphus could be forced to clamber up my scrollbar. As it stands and stood, the charm of the hourglass was gone and I missed it. Tempus won’t stop fugit, sure, but at least we once had the chance to watch it play out in style.

The word hourglass lost any meaning for me beyond frantic rage.

The phone made another petulant ring. I sighed and picked up the receiver, smiling fixedly at the stain on the wall opposite my desk.

‘Hello, Swansby’s Press,’ I said, ‘how may I help you?’

‘Burn in hell, Mallory,’ said the synthetically distorted voice on the other end of the line.

‘Yes,’ I said, and gave the stain a thumbs-up. ‘Yes, you’re through to the right department. How may I help you?’

There was the sound of breathing. Digitised breath shuttlecocked down the phone line.

‘Twice in one day,’ I said. I’m not sure why.

‘There’s a bomb in the building,’ the voice said. Then they rang off and the hourglass on my screen flipped one final time.

D is for

dissembling

(adj.)